Christian higher education (CHE) had been totally disappeared from the China mainland since the 1950s, and related studies only revived in the past 40 years since Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up policy in 1978. The present paper is an attempt to report what had happened in the past 40 years, and to illustrate some significant contributions the resurgence of the study of CHE had made to the academia in the development of higher education in China. New forms of representation of CHE are found and new approaches to the study of CHE are also explored. [This paper was presented at the 2018 International Chinese Sociological Association (ICSA) Asian Conference Forty Years of China's Reform and Social Change, organized by the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology on December 19-20, 2018.]